Hemingway

Hemingway: 微博 expert - Hemingway: Twitter expert ahead of his time

Hemingway: 微博 expert - It costed him to telegram in wars, shorter, better. Now, we're in an era - you can write whatever cabbage at your finger tips.

I thought practicing his style sounds easy when you throw away the grammar out of your writing. Here is mine:

"Choose to stay in faith, but not in fear.

Choose to believe for bright future, but not to worry about future.

Choose positive, not negative.

Guard your mind, not allowing negative people (complainers) in your life."

Ignore any non-specific comment to save room for the constructive critique of feedback. Can you leave me alone - if you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all (Bambi).

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For sale: baby shoes, never worn. - Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s six-word story shows tight writing at its best.

Tight writing means making your point with the fewest words possible. Using simple words and varying your sentence length.

Make each word you use earn its keep. No waffle or padding. In marketing, for instance, leave the reader in no doubt what you want them to do.

Tight writing means one idea for each sentence. No lazy verbs like was, are, have, been. And no fillers and qualifiers.

Avoid fillers
Tight writing means no fillers—words linking nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. Words like: is, of, in, about, for, on, to, into, onto, by, with, was, not, too.

And qualifiers
Tight writing means no qualifiers—words that come before an adjective or adverb. Words like: although, rather, quite, sometimes, often, may, very, rather, somewhat, more, most, less, least, too, so, just, enough, indeed, still, almost, fairly, really, pretty, even, a bit, a little, a (whole) lot, a good deal, a great deal, kind of, sort of.

When you edit, do a search and destroy of fillers and qualifiers.

Practice tight writing
I struggle to write tight. Who doesn’t? Needless words creep into my copy. To practice tight writing I rewrite gobbledygook (see example below).

Gobbledygook —

“You, the customer, are entitled to a refund of the money to be transmitted as a result of this agreement if PayPal does not forward the money received from you within 10 days of the date of its receipt, or does not give instructions committing an equivalent amount of money to the person designated by you within 10 days of the date of the receipt of the funds from you unless otherwise instructed by you.

If your instructions as to when the money shall be forwarded or transmitted are not complied with, and the money has not yet been forwarded or transmitted, you have a right to a refund of your money.”

Tight writing—
“We’ll refund your money if we don’t pay it for you within 10 days of us getting it from you.

More blog posts at: [url]http://www.linkedin.com/today/author/94026284[/url] by Paul Eveleigh